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PlaceZombies.com!

“Darkness falls across the land
The midnight hour is close at hand
Creatures crawl in search of blood
To terrorize y'all's neighborhood
And whosoever shall be found
Without the soul for getting down
Must stand and face the hounds of hell
And rot inside a corpse's shell.
The foulest stench is in the air
The funk of 40,000 years
And grizzly ghouls from every tomb
Are closing in to seal your doom
And though you fight to stay alive
Your body starts to shiver
For no mere mortal can resist
The evil of the thriller.”

-Vincent Price / Thriller

I’m with Vincent. Who can resist zombies? They’re everywhere! But on the internet, they are facing an uphill battle against the kittehs. They were dealt a heavy blow with the release of placekitten.com which allowed developers of all sorts to add kittens to their site with a simple URL. But now the zombies are ready to strike back. U CAN HAZ ZOMBIES!

While working with a client who has a horror bent, we decided that the kittens weren’t cutting it. Or that they weren’t cutting anything. Or that the kittens weren’t cut up enough. Something needed cutting dang it! The discussion led to placezombies.com.

We’re happy to release this plague into the wild. Simply point your browser to http://placezombies.com/300x200 and you get a 300px X 200px zombie faster than it takes to turn into one. We’ve also added a switch that allows for Old-timey ‘Night of the Living Dead’ grayscale images. Just add the ‘g’ switch to the url: http://placezombies.com/g/300x200 and you’re back in the 50s.

Why is this post tagged with Drupal? Because we've released a submodule for the Dummy Image module that will automatically infectpopulate your pages based on your Dummy Image settings. Might be a slight delay in getting into the actual module, so I've included the folder here. It goes in the 'services' folder in Dummy Image.

The tech involved is a node.js implementation behind a varnish server. Node.js is a server-side implementation of js that is super quick with the I/O work. Varnish is a supreme caching layer. This allows us to have a lot of traffic without regenerating everything every time we get a request. These zombies just won’t die.